Strangers in Virtual Space (Part III)

September, 2010

People primarily join LinkedIn to post their professional resumes online. Thereafter they seek out former collegues for recommendations, current business partners for introductions to secondary network connections. Mission accomplished, profiles take up an inertial existence on the brink of entropy.

Indeed in July 14th, at 10:45am,  I tweeted ‘the Death of LinkedIn unless it reinvents itself: RT @louisgray LinkedIn Remains Underused, as a Stale Resume http://goo.gl/fb/swGv0′.

Just when I was about to give up, between July and now, LinkedIn made revolutionary changes to its interface. For instance, it added a ‘Like’ button as well as a ’Share’ button, both real-time features, that suddenly made networking via LinkedIn, yes, easier.

Networkers, however, are not so easily persuaded to utilize any such features. 

There is a reason why lack of network participation is rampant in LinkedIn. And it has to do with the cultural premise laid down for making a network connection, which works against networking.

According to LinkedIn, only invite people:

• You know well, and
• Who know You. In fact, the  recipient can punish you by indicating that he/she doesn’t know you.

If You know them and They know you, then:

• Why update status?
• Why participate? 

There is limited or no incentive to do any of the above.

On the other hand, if we connect by, yes accident! Then there is all the reason in the world to reach out in the virtual space and find out about the strangers in our network and vice verca, Be Found.

Therefore, instead of being a boutique networking shop that caps connections to 30K, I encourage LinkedIn to continue with its new paradigm: one that makes networking easier by way of a speedy change in favor of random accidents in network connections.

American Girl

July, 2010

The American Girl series provides young girls with resources to stand tall, reach high, and dream big. When I picked up the last copy of ‘A Girl’s Guide to Money – How to Make It, Save It, and Spend It’, an American Girl series presentation, I did so with relish.

What kind of financial literacy are young girls receiving that will let them grow up to be the women who make a difference tomorrow?

American girls in this how-to guide are advised to concentrate on receiving interest by putting their money away into savings accounts, certificate of deposits (CDs) and savings bonds. She won’t get much, but something is better than nothing.

Then there are other money making instruments. By buying stocks American girls buy a little of a business. Although not 100% guranteed, over time, if the business grows  and makes money, she can make money, too. And last but not the least, is buying a share of a mutual fund, which is like buying a basket full of different stocks or businesses.

As American girls work and save, the trick to becoming a millionaire is to keep on saving. In 10 years, a 5% return on money through investment instruments discussed above, turns $1,000 dollars into $1,629 dollars. In 50 years that $1,000 becomes $11,467.

Not convinced by the ‘keep saving’ mantra, I was eager for a second opinion. For this I turn to Robert Kiyosaki.

• Robert Kiyosaki differentiates between savers and investors.

To American girl who says, “I am investing. I have a portfolio of mutual funds. I own stocks and bonds”, he says, “you are sort of investing, but investing from a saver’s point of view with a saver’s set of values”. In fact, in 1971, President Nixon took America off of the gold standard. The savers of today, as a consequence, find in their paper assests more financial worry than ever before.

• To Kiyosaki, diversification into stocks, bonds and mutual funds, is protection against ignorance.

It’s a top-down approach that makes little sense if American girl knows what she’s doing.  Her choice of investments indicate that she is not choosing to learn how to invest her own money, but simply turning it over to experts, financial advisers, the like who sell fish.

• Kiyosaki contests that the fastest way to improve financial literacy is by changing one’s environment.

For her wealth to grow, American girl must therefore cultivate a financially-rich environment that supports and sustains her goals. She must go to places where people are getting rich, join an investment club, meet new friends who also want to grow richer.

It is time American girl realizes her dream not by being a passive investor, but by being a leader, who understands the process. So that when a reporter asks her the same question asked of Henry Ford – “What would she do if she lost her fortune?” - she would reply, “I’d have it back in less than five years.”

Big Sur

June, 2010

In his best seller A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity (2008), now out in paperback, No Spin Zone host Bill O’Reilly satirizes one of California’s more popular destinations, immortalized by Will Davies on this cover.

The people frequenting Big Sur, Bill says, are soothing people. They are patient people accepting of faults of others. They live in places like Big Sur to look out at sea and see stuff, which they do for a long time because there is no rush.

Patience, as someone other than Bill once said, is its own reward.

Bill, however, is not a patient man. He is impatient with tardiness, with bad service. He calls this ‘sweating the small stuff ‘ and as behooves the babyboomer generation, lays the blame for it on his dad.

One visible advantage is that the Factor staff is quick on the uptake. There is no fooling around with assignments. Everyone is on top of their game – the intangible result is pride in their work that has set a gold standard in the TV news industry.

So is sweating_ the_ small_ stuff a blessing in disguise, a cloud with a silver lining?

Machiavelli’s Prince, for instance, must never take it easy in times of peace. He must always be out hunting, getting his body used to hardships. He must be learning practical geography, abilities that teach him how to locate the enemy, how to lead his army. He must also be learning from history, studying the likes of Scipio or Cyrus.

Niccolò Machiavelli (3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527), an expert at turning what is bane into a boon, intimates that  sweating_the_small_stuff may after all have its share of virtues. Because when we can’t, don’t, choose, not to fight in small increments, the big fight, for which we’re saving it, is lost to us.

Indispensable

May, 2010

In Linchpin (2010), yet another of his ground breaking installment, change agent Seth Godin acquaints us afresh to the gift of emotional labor, which is unique to the human experience. Only we possess it. And only we can discharge of it.

Examples of emotional labor are found in artists and writers. But when was the last time you changed someone’s mind? When was the last time you reached a hard-to-reach person?

Emotional labor is an interaction that produces change in others. It let’s us figure out what to do next. It let’s us engage in creating art of value that is indispensable. Equally, when we are ’told’ what to do is an opportunity lost to create that art.

Seth Godin asks us to dream a new dream – about vision and engagement, and counter that which has no place in human existence - simple obedience.

This is made hard by our biology. Our lizard brain sabotages anything that feels threatening to it, which it expresses through anxiety, which Godin calls false fear.

It is difficult work to be brave enough to make a difference. To fight the lizard, we must bring our humanity to work – that is our whole self  – because engagement requires maturity, soul, personal strength.

The last 200 hundred years, defined by the Industrial Age, taught us to be machines, automatons, to keep our head down and do the work as told.

The new Informational Age challenges us to shake off the slave mentality and once more regain our human achievement – which is to be artists, to expend emotional labor, make interactions that produce change – to be a linchpin, the undefinable quality that makes us indispensable.

Paradigm Shift

April, 2010

The United States of America has enjoyed the longest peace time in history, with the effect that ours is a country primed for business ventures and entreprenuership. Tax breaks for businesses tell us that our government wants us to create jobs, not look for a job! Small to medium size businesses are called the engines of American economy.

So why is it that schools don’t tell children to grow up to own their businesses, become their own boss and quit the employee mentality?

Robert Kiyosaki, a baby boomer, has it that the answer lies in lack of financial literacy pervasive throughout our education system. To fill this void, he wrote  myth-buster of a book Rich Dad Poor Dad (1997) to tell generation Y that the values of his pre-Vietman era poor dad: work hard, live below your means, save money, get out of debt, invest for the longterm, far from being an enabler are actually an impediment to getting financially ahead in future America. His book:

• Alerts us to the danger of hanging onto the paradigm that: School prepares us for a job.
• Points out that due to globalization, white collar jobs, the bread and butter of any middle class economy, are now exported where these services can be obtained at a lower cost.  This economic reality will result in a continual shrinking of American middle class at the expense of an expanding economic class of the rich and the poor.

The way out of this downward spiral is to be entreprenuerial, financially literate, a leader. One caveat to those making this critical transition is that our intelligence quotient only does us as much good as our emotional quotient lets us. To drive this point home, Kiyosaki underscores the principle teachings of a military education and contrasts that to expensive MBAs.

While expensive MBAs teach insides of a business without burning into us how to sustain in it, military schools instill in us leadership values, adherence to a mission and ability to pick a team to carry the mission forward, which unmistakably are key conditions to becoming successful entrepreneurs.

What we have is a paradigm shift where old values are coming down, and new ones going up on its stead. Let’s make sure that we’re ready for the change.

Strangers in Virtual Space (Part II)

March, 2010

Social networking is a cosmopolitan, global phenomenon. As a LinkedIn user, I wondered why everyone in my contact had to be from Boston, an experience I found parochial to say the least.  As an alternative window to the world, I turned to Twitter.

Twitter enabled me to follow any stranger anywhere in the virtual space. As a result, I tapped into chat streams the like of Robert Kong Hai from China at weirdchina and DavidForbes, self styled as a ’monk in temperament but dragon at war’.

Is Twitter the El Dorado of social engagement?

Like Coca-Cola and Blue Jeans, Twitter is yet another American gift to the world at large. Twitter’s real time IMs driving 15 seconds of fame makes it more representative of American pop culture than any other social networking projects going around.

On the upside, Twitter’s ability to multiply a follower to tens of thousands is simply diabolical. On the downside, a tweeple has little or no control over understanding who is following her.

The followers are an enigma to any tweeple. If I am on a message, tweeting new jobs for instance, then the crowd following me might as well be: Job Seekers. But beyond this narrow definition, there is no limit to who follows and why.

Twitter’s signature 140 char is a brutal exercise in Occam’s Razor,  but not without its compensations. As tweeps are free to follow-unfollow, so are we free to our tweets.

This last point is especially poignant because, confronted by a blind fate swinging to and fro between acceptance and rejection, it informs us to forge our own unique path.

Strangers in Virtual Space

February, 2010

With social networking on the web – Seek and You will find – entered the 21st century.

A year ago, Stacey Narveson, then Job Coordinator for Right Management, regularly introduced job seekers such as myself, to LinkedIn. As in the past, networking is still the number one recourse to finding jobs. However, to Stacey’s point, business networking is now made easy by the advent of sites such as LinkedIn.

As a business oriented social networking site, LinkedIn uses three degrees of separation, and so doing, brings us that much closer to finding jobs, business deals, expertise request, new ventures and much more.

Is LinkedIn a brokerage house, an e-bay like platform where, we take the place of commodities?

A fact not introduced to users new to LinkedIn is that by seeking out and finding - what we’re effectively engaging in is emotional labor. A close enough analogy is buying a car first only to realize that insurance must go with it.

In the case of business connections, unfortified by personal attachments, many of us are choosing to fore-go the insurance part, ending up instead with databases running into hundreds of names with no recognitions to go by, as if we are such stuff as dreams are made on.

Let us dispel mutual strangeness, in favor of making LinkedIn the choice forum for practicing, Love Thy Neighbor. What if we don’t commiserate with our connections, by virtue of our shared connectivity, we still love each other.

American Dream

January, 2010

In this post, my first, I wanted to bring you the advent of Grameen into the American landscape. Please check out the Time article - Can Microfinance Make It in America? – http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1950949-2,00.html for more details.

U.S Grameen has started working in our cities such as Manhattan, San Francisco, Omaha and Charlotte.  The target demographic is the unbankable, a medley population of immigrants and women, living on subsistence level.

Grameen’s goal in the U.S is same as it is worldwide – to get poor entrepreneurs grow from a subsistence living to a livelihood.

The concept of microfinance is nothing new in America. As a student, I got my first credit offer reaching $3,000 in limit. Since then, I received options of using 0% credit for the next six months.

Who is unbankable in America anyway? At one time, banks were issuing credits to anyone and everyone!

So, why is it that microfinancing wasn’t an American Dream that got sold to the world, but the other way around, it having to come to the U.S.?

What do we do with our microfinancing opportunity is the crux of the matter. Most all cases, microfinancing is issued as a consumer good. And we as consumers burn up our credit in perishable items.

That is why, not microfinancing, but what it is being used for by Grameen matters to us in America.

• U.S. Grameen approaches those who have proven their entrepreneurship by selling for instance, food and trinkets in street corners. How can this unbankable entrepreneur be rewarded for his/her initiative? The answer lies in microcredit.

Remember to set aside a portion of the revenue to pay off debt!! Grameen has a solution to this dilemma as well. It’s called peer-pressure.

• Microcredit is given to individual entrepreneurs in a group-lending setting. And the ability or the lack of it of one in the group to re-pay the loan on time affects the further lending capability of his/her peers.

But the bedrock of lending for Grameen is its genuine interest in sustaining these entrepreneurs through education, ideas and support that relies on team building and networking groups.

Enfranchising the disenfranchised is also a piece of Americana.